The New School for Social Research Office of the Dean presents Dr. Stephan Klasen, who will deliver a lecture titled "Gender Bias in Mortality in Developing Countries: Trends, Determinants, and Controversies."

Comments will be delivered by Sanjay Reddy, associate professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research.

Ever since Amartya Sen popularized the issue in 1990 with his claim that there are 100 million missing women in the world, a large literature has emerged studying levels, trends, and determinants of gender bias in mortality. The consensus in the literature has been that this bias is large (but declining slightly over time) and largely concentrated among children (including sex-selective abortions) in South Asia and China. It also has attracted its share of controversies with some claiming that most alleged gender bias in mortality is actually driven by biological differences and others claiming that it is much larger and mostly focused on adults in Africa and India. The lecture will critically review those debates and summarize Klasen’s current research findings on this issue.

Stephan Klasen is the spring 2013 Theodor Heuss Visiting Professor in Economics, The New School for Social Research, and professor of development economics and empirical economic research at the University of Göttingen, where he also heads the Ibero-American Institute. Previously he was professor of economics at the University of Munich as well as a fellow at King's College in Cambridge and an economist at the World Bank in South Africa. His research interests are in population, labor, welfare, and development economics. He holds a BA, MA, and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His current research interests include an assessment of the relation between labor market events and demographic decisions at the household level, an analysis of the determinants of undernutrition and child mortality in developing countries, the linkages between inequality, growth, and well-being, and the causes and consequences of gender inequality in developing countries.